Absolutely, no one would argue that the only way to be profitable without ads is by charging $8/month like Twitter or the €11.99/month that Zuckerberg wants in the EU. This might be true for closed companies who need to deal with all their overhead, but (e.g) Lemmy has the equivalent of 3.5 FTE and said that €15k/month would be enough for all of them to continue working on it. Even with this ridiculously low threshold, they are still not able to hit the target.
Now, imagine if these sites worked in a system where everyone would have to pay a little bit (or have someone else paying for them) so that every user is contributing to development/hosting/etc. Get people paying $9/year ($0.75/month) and I can bet you that you'd be a lot more than 3.5 FTE, we would be getting a viable alternative to Reddit and without all the enshittification and Surveillance Capitalism associated with Big Tech.
Now, imagine if these sites worked in a system where everyone would have to pay a little bit (or have someone else paying for them) so that every user is contributing to development/hosting/etc. Get people paying $9/year ($0.75/month) and I can bet you that you'd be a lot more than 3.5 FTE, we would be getting a viable alternative to Reddit and without all the enshittification and Surveillance Capitalism associated with Big Tech.